Patent · US Expired

Logical track write scheduling system for a parallel disk drive array data storage subsystem

US5124987A · kind A · utility

388Cited by
7References
80Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateApr 16, 1990
Grant dateJun 23, 1992
Priority date
Expiry dateApr 16, 2010

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F11/2089
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

The parallel disk drive array data storage subsystem maps between virtual and physical data storage devices and schedules the writing of data to these devices. The data storage subsytem functions as a conventional large form factor disk drive memory, using an array of redundancy groups, each containing N+M disk drives. A performance improvement is obtained by eliminating redundancy data updates in the redundancy group by writing modified virtual track instances into previously emptied logical tracks and marking the data contained in the previous virtual track instance location as invalid. Logical cylinders containing a mixture of valid and invalid virtual tracks are emptied by writing all the valid virtual tracks into a previously emptied logical cylinder as a background process.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.